Frostbite; thrown into water by horse; horse shot under its rider who becomes: A HORSE IN THE UNCONSCIOUS.
Case 359. (Eder, March, 1916.)
A private in the Royal Engineers, 25, went through Gallipoli without injury and without fears. He was sent to the hospital in Malta, December 18. When observed by Eder, February 7, the frostbitten finger of the right hand was well although there was some loss of grip. He was suffering from insomnia, terrifying dreams, shaky hands. It seems that December 6, a horse started and he was thrown into the water from a bridge. The next day his horse was shot under him. A few days later, a finger was frostbitten. Then his hands began to tremble and the insomnia set in, with severe headaches.
This patient was a jovial, thickset, farmer’s son, with a diffuse enlargement of the thyroid gland, a high blood pressure, lymphocytosis, a fine tremor of the hands, irregular and rapid pulse, and anginal attacks. Extremities were cold and blue; the palms perspired markedly; there was hypersensitiveness to sound; there were occasional attacks of dizziness, with a feeling of suffocation; there was frequent desire to micturate.
The patient’s dream was always the same: He saw a Frenchman digging a knife into his horse, getting off a cart to do this somewhere in Serbia. Occasionally he had this dream in the form of a vision in the daytime. It seems that he had actually seen a French soldier plunge a knife into a mule to make it go. He had been busy with horses since childhood: as stableboy and groom. He thought that the sufferings of the mules in Gallipoli were worse than those of human beings. According to Eder, this farmer’s son was the horse of his dreams; instinctive fear had to emerge; he was pitying himself. According to Eder, “That the person should become a horse in the unconscious would not startle one who has dipped into the totems and taboos of the lower races.”